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You wake up on the bed. You can’t remember how you got there. You remember pieces of last night, faces, voices, having sex in the bathroom. But you can’t remember how you came to be lying on your left side in bed with cloudy bluish-gray morning coming in the window.
A friend appears at the bedroom doorway. You had a party last night and everyone fell asleep in the front room. You thought you had too.
You try to tell your friend good morning or hi or any of half a dozen things you’d normally say in such circumstances. You hear, as if from miles away, a long, whiny vowel sound escape from your mouth. You don’t think he could’ve heard you, so you try again. Same thing. You feel it vibrate through your ears like when they’re stopped up and all you have to do is swallow to hear right again. So you try to swallow, but you can’t. You only get halfway.
Now your other friends are in the room, looking at you with concern. You can hear them talking, but it doesn’t make an impression. You know something is drastically wrong with you. You know they know it too. But only half of you cares.
Your whole body feels numb, like it fell asleep and you wonder vaguely if it’ll start to tingle when it wakes up like your foot would if it’d fallen asleep. But it doesn’t wake up, and you aren’t sure you want it to because you notice a queasy, fragmented feeling inside and know it’d feel worse if you weren’t so damn numb outside.
You feel like two people, or maybe more. It’s hard to tell. Your essence seems to exist in myriad sparkles of light that connect in strange ways when they connect at all. Time seems nonexistent, or at least meaningless, while you try to figure out which part of you desperately wants to express your feelings to your gathered friends and which part of you wants to curl up in someone’s arms and cry until all the strange sensations go away.
You try to talk again, but keep having to swallow. It frustrates you, makes you want to hit something, when you can’t even finish a word, let alone a sentence. Your friends try to comfort you but they can’t. These feelings are on the inside and they can only touch the outside. You know they’re scared shitless and want to cry because you can’t tell them you understand. Your mind and your body are so far apart that all you can do is make baby talk and wave your arms around clumsily like dead fish.
Ambulance lights are blinking outside. You don’t notice what the men look like when they come to take you to the hospital. You don’t even know if all of them are men, or how many of them there are. You hear your friends giving them vital information like they’re talking in a toilet. With intense concentration, the kind of concentration you used to use to get through the really tough parts of video games, you try to move yourself over onto the stretcher. You’re probably only making it harder for the men, who must’ve lifted many unconscious or dead people onto stretchers before. But you want to prove that part of you at least is alive and conscious.
You are embarrassed to the core of your being. Bad enough that your friends have to see you like this, but for some reason the strangers bother you more. The friends will understand that this is only one incident in your life, even if you end up dying from it. But this is all the strangers ever get to see of you. They don’t know your fears and dreams or what you’d be doing if today was normal. You’re just another overdose to them.
They are piling thin hospital blankets on top of you. You hate those blankets. They’re never warm enough and smell like the hospital. You wonder if they really care whether you freeze to death or if it’s just one more small detail their job demands.
One of your friends grabs your hand and you think you manage to squeeze back. She prays for you and you wish she didn’t have to. She’s only 14.
You’re old enough to know better.
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You’re strapped down now and they’re carrying you out of the room, down the stairs, taking you outside where cold is only a vague sensation on the horizon of consciousness. You’re more concerned with the nausea caused by going down the stairs. That feels real.
You don’t remember the ambulance ride, except maybe you puked on the way. Even if you wanted to, you wouldn’t have time to try to remember because they’re telling you to slide onto a table with something large, white, and plastic on it. A nurse explains that this is the scale they use to weigh people who can’t stand. After strenuously exerting yourself to get on the table, you’re damn glad you don’t have to stand.
The nurse lifts one edge of the plastic and attaches it to a hook overhead. You feel it lift you off the table while you stare at the hook. After it sets you back down, you see your mother standing at the foot of the table. You’re not conscious enough to feel any particular emotions about this, but you’re glad she’s there in a sort of mechanical way. Mostly though, you’re tired.
Now you’re in an ICU bed. They’re just as uncomfortable and impersonal as regular hospital beds. There’s a big plastic curtain mostly surrounding your bed, and doctors come in now and then to poke and prod. You still can’t say much, but you don’t have to swallow all the time now. You’re almost glad you’re too nauseous to eat hospital food. You don’t know how many times you puke, or even whether you do or not, but people are always coming in and out talking to you. You don’t know where all your friends are, but your mother comes to talk. You wonder if she can understand you, if you’re saying anything intelligent. Somebody opened your curtain some and you can see blue between the slats in the window blind. You can’t decide if it’s nice to know there’s still a world out there or if the light hurts your eyes.
You aren’t sure how much time passes, punctuated by scurrying nurses and the vague blabbering of a TV somewhere. You talk to people to prove you’re getting better, but your words still come out cottony and full of gasps for breath. Your body doesn’t seem so far away now, and sometimes you can make the arm that doesn’t have an IV in it go where you want it to. You can’t snap your fingers or point at what you intend to, and your hand shakes like a leaf about to fall from a tree. You don’t like using a bedpan, and it’s hard to lift yourself up so they can slide it under you. You try some hospital food, and it doesn’t come back up.
Not long after they move you to a normal room, a woman with a clipboard comes in. She works for the mental health clinic. She asks a lot of questions and doesn’t seem to understand that your mouth needs time to struggle out an answer your mind thought of long ago. She assumes you were trying to kill yourself and you violently gesture with dead fish arms.
"I was trying to get high," you try to say. You wonder if she understands you. You wonder if she realizes she’s making you feel stupid. She seems especially condescending while you’re trying to make your fingers work long enough to sign the form she’s filled out for you.
When you go home, you wobble when you walk. It takes a week for your hands to work like they used to. Your memory feels like it was ripped to shreds and put back together wrong. But you will never forget this experience.
No matter how hard you try.